Game of the year #
The only games released this year that I completely finished were Mario & Luigi Brothership and Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door Switch remake. I put tens of hours into SMTV: Vengeance and Metaphor: Refantazio but didn’t finish them and probably won’t. I completed a lot of older games like several Fire Emblem entries (The Blazing Blade, Path of Radiance, Awakening); Soul Hackers 2; Metroid: Zero Mission; Elden Ring; Pikmin 4; and Paper Mario: The Origami King. Overall, if last year was my year of JRPGs having played a lot of Falcom and Dragon Quest games, this was my year of rediscovering what Nintendo has been up to past and present.
Favorite game released this year: Mario & Luigi Brothership (NSW)
Favorite old ass game I finished this year: Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade (GBA)
I’ve always liked Fire Emblem and decided to play this one when iOS emulators first dropped. I completed the game with the virtual GBA interface on Delta on my phone which is a really annoying control scheme but is a testament to how enjoyable and challenging this game is. Super satisfying nail-biting strategy gaming. Side note, I wrote about a good controller for Delta on iPad here.
Favorite overall game I finished this year: Pikmin 4 (NSW)
Special mention: Paper Mario: The Origami King (NSW)
Podcast of the year #
I spent a lot of time this year thinking about gaming as kind of an escape from life and politics so I went back to see what my favs from Giant Bomb are up to now. Giant Bomb was my favorite outlet in the 2010s; I listened to their podcast weekly for years but fell off when I largely stopped playing games in the latter half of that decade. Then, the decade ended with the “main guys” all leaving the company. Special mention goes to Brad, Vinny, and Alex’s Nextlander which is awesome, but my podcast of the year goes to my discovery of Jeff Gerstmann’s The Jeff Gerstmann Show hosted by Jeff Gerstmann. Jeff is just the man, nobody talking about games has less pretense and more knowledge. There are plenty of people who have been covering that industry since the 90s who got stuck in one rut or another, or moved into development or PR, but Jeff has been trucking along adapting such that he’s as interested in contemporary Korean gacha shooters as he is in NES hidden gems. Plus he’s a very charming guy with an interesting life.
General favorite podcast this year: The Jeff Gerstmann Show
For honorable mentions here are some political & economic podcasts I’ve been enjoying this year:
Movie of the year #
My favorite movie released this year was Longlegs (2024). Special mention to The Coffee Table (2022). I’m not really watching movies much these days so only two hours of freaky shit can keep my attention, which both of these movies are. It came out in theaters at the end of last year but The Zone of Interest (2023) was the best movie I watched overall.
Show of the year #
I watched several seasons this year of Netflix’s game show The Circle which is a guilty pleasure. I’m continuing to watch the bizarre dogshit that is FROM and will continue to, but I do not recommend anyone watch it. The only anime I got caught up on is Made in Abyss which is just so singular and unique, I love everything about it. House of the Dragon season 2 was OK; same for The Boys season 4. So with a relatively low bar, the two things I liked the most this year were True Detective Night Country and Slow Horses season 4.
Event of the year #
Setting aside recent events in Manhattan since I’m still waiting to get a better picture of the larger situation, I’m giving thing-that-happened-of-the-year to Joost Klein’s Europapa Eurovision perfomance and subsequent disqualification. Other things happened that were crazier or funnier, but this event balances funniness, global appeal, and political salience.
For those who missed it, Dutch underground rapper Joost Klein submitted a really fucking sick song called Europapa to the Eurovision song contest on behalf of the Netherlands. The song itself is an absolutely banger and actually a beautiful political-cultural statement about the value of internationalism, progressive national pride, and how music gives us identity and informs our values.
The whole Eurovision event was mired in protest for inviting Israel during the country’s active genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. While Klein wasn’t a participant in the protests, he did signal distaste for Israel’s inclusion by covering himself with the Dutch flag and interrupting the Israeli participants during a press conference. Then, Klein was disqualified from the finals based on a seemingly unrelated altercation, but possibly was under higher scrutiny due to bringing the tension in front of the cameras. You can read about it more here.
Special mention goes to AJ, Big Justice, and The Rizzler on AEW, which was awesome.
Book of the year #
Here’s a full list of books I read this year. I re-read Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past, which solidified it altogether as probably my favorite science fiction opus of all time. I also read the Game of Thrones books which are really great, and I got up to the latest in Mick Herron’s Slough House series, which the show Slow Horses is based on. Overall though the best experience I had reading this year was reading historian Richard J. Evans’ Third Reich Trilogy, a history of the rise of the Nazis and their actions in WW2. The novel version of The Zone of Interest is a good supplementary piece which benefits from deeper knowledge of this era. I also started reading HG Wells’ oeuvre but that will mostly be a project for next year.
Music of the year #
By sheer numbers in my Apple Music year end summary, the things I listened to the most this year were the soundtracks to Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, games I’ve never played. They’re both absolute triumphs though; I have too many favorite individual tracks to list but I’ll highlight The Sunleth Waterscape and New Bodhum . Here’s a recent article about the making of the XIII-2 soundtrack.
Youtube of the year #
Here are two accounts I started following this year: Little Chinese Everywhere, a mellow and non-exploitative travel vlogger, and Basement Brothers, which mostly covers 80s and 90s Japanese PC games. Also special mention to CHAOSTOWN documenting PDX bullshit.
Apps, websites, and services of the year #
I think I’ve been using it since last year but I fucking love linkding; I use it every day as my read-it-later platform. All the shit I come across on the web gets saved there via an iOS Shortcut or the Firefox addon and I mark it as read as I go through it. It’s a Youtube watchlist, reminder system, and reading list all in one, so minimal, so snappy. I host it on my home server which you can read about here.
I got more into Obsidian this year and it’s now my personal knowledge platform. I’ve thought about writing a full post about my Obsidian setup but it’s pretty standard. I just use the Minimal theme and use remotely-save to sync via Webdav.
I set up Paperless-ngx for things like documents and identity cards which has helped me feel a lot more organized compared to folders of PDFs. Same thing with Actual Budget for my finances. Also, I’m generally AI-critical and think LLMs are largely less-than-useless but I’ve had some fun using llama3 via ollama and openwebui to do little tasks like writing productivity shell scripts.
I started browsing ResetEra this year for game discussion which is a pretty good community. And I’ve been pleased to see Lemmy stay alive and active after the Reddit controversies.
Overall though, my website of the year is this website, my personal Hugo blog hosted on Netlify via Gitlab. It’s been really fun to learn about static hosting and have a little spot on the web that feels like I really own it. Special mention to the continued development of the Fediverse, though.